


For the duration

by Naraht



Series: Incendiary [3]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Coming of Age, Infidelity, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pacifism, Soldiers, World War II, epistolary in parts, quaker character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:55:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Events cause Andrew to question his pacifism and, when he decides to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, wartime separation tests his relationship with Ralph.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_London, 1943_

"I'm sorry I'm late home," said Andrew as soon as he came through the door. "We had some shocking news at Meeting. Tom has enlisted in the Army."

"If that's what you call shocking news…" said Ralph mildly.

Andrew submitted himself to be kissed, as he always did, but Ralph could tell that his mind was still running on the question.

"Oh, but Dave is aghast," Andrew continued. "Tom's family are all Friends, you see, as far back as anyone can remember. If it had been me, perhaps no one would have been surprised. But Tom… do you remember how I told you about his brother? Richard was in the FAU in Greece when the Germans took him prisoner. It's eaten away at Tom, not being able to do anything. I expect that's what decided him in the end."

"You once told me not to spare your feelings," said Ralph. "So I'll say what I really think. Good for him. I take back anything I might have said about Tom."

"He's off to start training next week. Royal Artillery. They're making him an officer."

"Even better."

Andrew looked at Ralph. His mouth set into a narrow line, as if he were the one being asked to give the order to start the barrage. He nodded once and then looked away.

They didn't speak again until they had sat down to Sunday dinner. Ralph had done his best with the limited materials available to him, but the roast, which used most of their meat ration for the week, still seemed very meagre compared to the quantity of un-rationed potatoes. Both of them ate most meals at their respective work canteens, so it was not deprivation as anyone could reckon it in those days, but it still was difficult not to be able to offer Andrew more.

"Does it ever make you think about enlisting?" asked Ralph. 

"I think about it all the time." Andrew put down knife and fork, gazed at his plate as if he could find an answer there congealing with the ersatz gravy. "Tom isn't the only one, you know. Several of ours have gone. It's impossible having to wait like this, we all thought that we would be on the Continent long ago. Not that the ones who are there have had the chance to do much. And then there's all this news..."

Ralph did not have to ask what news he meant. Like everyone else they had seen the headlines the previous June. In the Telegraph: 'GERMANS MURDER 700,000 JEWS IN POLAND.' And in the Times: 'MASSACRE OF JEWS--OVER 1,000,000 DEAD SINCE THE WAR BEGAN.' Andrew had read through all the articles with great care, white-faced, and then had gone very silent.

"Yes," agreed Ralph.

Once he would have said more, told the boy off in no uncertain terms, but Ralph had learnt from painful experience that nothing was more certain to get Andrew's back up and ensure a long campaign of dogged opposition. For a pacifist his instincts were surprisingly combative.

"On the other hand, one asks oneself what good it would do to add more killing to the score."

"You can't pretend that all deaths are equal. They're not."

"Can I pretend to know otherwise? Can any of us?"

Ralph had no answer for that. It seemed a lot of flim-flam to him.

"I try to tell myself that I'm doing worthwhile work here in London," Andrew continued. "Not as worthwhile as Alec, perhaps, but no one expects him to feel guilty for having remained a civilian."

Andrew's continuing fondness for Alec was, Ralph had once felt, one of the great mysteries of life. Now it had become clear that Alec was one of the few men Andrew knew, outside of his circle in the Society of Friends, who did not trigger for him that instinctive, helpless sense of inferiority which was ingrained so deeply that one wondered whether even the end of the war would suffice to wash it away. 

Andrew was no coward. Ralph knew this; he had never questioned it. He just wondered whether Andrew knew it.

"You don't think Alec feels it?" said Ralph. "I'm sure he does."

"I've never asked."

Ralph shrugged. "I do, and I'm still in uniform. Why wouldn't he?"

"I know you would be out there if you could," Andrew said in a soft voice. "But I can't fight on your behalf, whatever I might decide to do."

This hit home. "I wouldn't ask you to," said Ralph stiffly.

Andrew had got up from the table and come around to Ralph's side, his empty plate in his hands. He leaned over to kiss the top of Ralph's head, then turned away, embarrassed, and busied himself at the sink.

"Shall we have tea?" he said, rallying after a few moments of feeling silence.

"Please," said Ralph, though it was not what he wanted at all.

***

"I didn't know that it bothered you," said Alec, reclining on the divan in his small Bloomsbury flat. "Him being a conchie, I mean."

"Of course it bothers me," said Ralph. "Why would you think it wouldn't?"

"Well, you've been with him for over a year. That's permanence as far as anyone can reckon it, these days. I suppose I thought otherwise it would have blown up between you by now."

"He isn't like Sandy was. Just because he has feelings about something doesn't mean that he goes and slits his wrists over it." 

Ralph paused. The subject of Sandy was still a sore point between them; even now Alec could not admit that it had all been a mistake, though the fact could not have been more evident either at the time or afterward.

"Sorry," added Ralph. "Unfair."

"No, it's perfectly fair," said Alec. 

For a moment his dark eyes were far away. Then they focused once again; he looked at Ralph with his usual kindly, perceptive expression. 

"He does good work, you know," Alec continued. "I see him at Barts all the time. It's all very well, having women as ambulance drivers, but we're always grateful to have Andrew when there's heavy lifting that needs doing. And from the amount of brick dust he tracks into the place, one can tell that he does as much in the line as any of the Heavy Rescue chaps. He's a good man to have at your side in a crisis."

"I know," said Ralph. "Better than anyone."

"Well, look around you. There's a war on. Andrew and I are on the home front, that's all."

"It's the principle of the thing," said Ralph. "Hell, Alec, I would never say any of this to him, but I hate it. The way people look at him, and the way he gets to expect it from them. I can't do a bloody thing. I wish I could protect him from it all somehow."

"By sending him into battle?"

Ralph could feel his jaw muscles clenching. "I just don't like the way he gives them something on him, right from the start. They can call him a coward without having to ask him the time of day. Everything after that they see in the same light."

"Ah," said Alec. "Yes. It all falls into place."

"Does it?"

"You want him to be you, Ralph. The perfect queer. Not a flaw, not a crack. Nothing the 'normals' can reproach you for. Only we both know that's the fastest way to crack up."

When it came to the subject of cracking up, Ralph had the distinct suspicion that Alec knew more than he was telling. How he had come by that knowledge, whether through intuition or through some more circuitous route, he had no desire to learn. He would not let Alec tempt him into asking, however pointed the hint. It was strange to think that, for all their long acquaintance, Andrew now knew him better than Alec ever would.

"Don't put anything on Andrew," added Alec. "He'll make his own way. And his own decisions."

A real drink would have been very welcome at that moment. Ralph was drinking weak, milkless cocoa and his mug was still three-quarters full. It had gone cold and viscid, like oil on the surface of the sea. One could hardly imagine anything more revolting. 

"Can't I get you anything else?" Ralph asked superfluously, wanting only to change the subject. His voice sounded loud and abrupt in his own ears. "More cocoa?"

Alec looked down at his own half-finished cocoa and shook his head, as if he were pronouncing over a patient whom he had never expected to live. It was a sign of the friendship that Alec still bore for Ralph that he came to visit, time and again, never expecting anything more than this from him.

A thought suddenly occurred to Ralph.

"You said earlier that you had something to tell me, didn't you?"

Now it was Alec's turn to look shifty. "Oh. Yes, but it's nothing really."

"Don't take that line with me, my dear, I know you too well. And after all my maunderings too. Go on and tell me, if you're going to."

Alec sighed. "As it happens, I've had another letter from Sandy."

"He never did stop writing, did he?"

"This time he actually has news. Somehow, I don't know who he slept with, he's been offered a post at a general practice in Finchley. He'll be moving down here any day now."

"Oh," said Ralph.

"Oh," Alec confirmed. He shook his head. "The worst of it is that I'm glad. For all his faults I find that I've missed him."

"No accounting for taste."

Alec smiled sadly. He looked as though he were going to reach out and touch Ralph's shoulder, but then he withdrew his hand. 

"No, Ralph, there isn't."

***

By the time that Sandy moved down to London it was getting on for October, and Alec's birthday. The first that Ralph heard of his arrival, and definite reappearance in Alec's life, was when a card arrived through the post. It was addressed in Sandy's characteristically illegible, doctorly hand.

Dr Sandy Reid  
has the pleasure of inviting  
Mr Ralph Lanyon  
and  
Mr Andrew Raynes  
to a soiree  
on the occasion of  
Alec Deacon's twenty-seventh birthday  
Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury  
from 7pm until late  
RSVP

Ralph stared at the small powder blue card, feeling rather as though he had just been handed a bomb on a very short fuse. He was just pondering the possibility of losing the invitation somewhere, preferably at the bottom of the sea, when he realised that Andrew had come up and was reading it over his shoulder.

"Hell," said Ralph, half to himself. "You'd think he'd have the decency to absent himself from all future parties, after the way he behaved that time in Bridstow."

Last year a major bombing raid had coincided with Alec's birthday. He'd been on duty for the better part of twenty-four hours and there had been, to Ralph's knowledge, no celebration at all. Perhaps now he was simply making up for lost time. Or perhaps Sandy had presented it to him as a _fait accompli_. Ralph's disapproval of the relationship meant that he was, once again, no longer privy to the smaller details of Alec's personal life.

"How wonderful," said Andrew. "Of course we'll go."

"You haven't met Sandy," Ralph said. He was struck by the challenge of summing up Sandy Reid in such a way that would make him comprehensible to plain-speaking, undramatic Andrew.

"No, I haven't. It's good of him to have remembered me, isn't it?"

"The thing is, Sandy's friends..." That didn't seem the right way of approaching it at all. Ralph tried again. "You ought to know that Sandy isn't like Alec."

Andrew looked as though he'd been handed an interesting philosophical question. "I don't suppose a person would say that you and I were at all alike."

"Don't you? I do."

But Andrew had taken the card now and was turning it over in his hands. Ralph didn't suppose that the boy had been invited to many soirees in the course of his twenty-two years.

"Will you write the RSVP?" said Andrew. "Or shall I?"

***

Ralph did not raise the topic again until they were on the Tube going to Alec and Sandy's party. They were alone in a corner of the carriage and the noise of the train was enough to keep them from being overheard.

"You know," he began, shifting his umbrella so that it would not drip against the leg of his trousers, "it was at Alec's twenty-fourth that I met Laurie."

"I remember," said Andrew unexpectedly. "He was so late that night that I worried he'd been caught up in a raid. When he did get back he was rather drunk and would only tell me that an odd thing had happened. Though I wondered whether I ought, I said that it must have been a big day for him, meeting his friend again."

Ralph frowned. "How did you know?"

"I'd seen your name on the _Phaedrus_ , you see. And when you rang the hospital, I was the one who answered the phone."

"Imagine that. I hadn't the slightest idea."

"I was so jealous," said Andrew quietly. "So terribly jealous and the worst of it was that I hardly even knew why. And then the next day when he told me that you had rescued him at Dunkirk, it was worse. I even asked him whether you were married, hoping that perhaps I'd got completely the wrong idea."

"Well, you hadn't."

"He hardly said anything about you, really; that told me all I needed to know."

"He said enough about you," said Ralph grudgingly. "Eventually."

Talking about Laurie with Andrew always made Ralph feel as if a shell had just exploded between them. The concussion left him stunned and bruised, unable to think clearly. When he remembered Laurie at school the image was clear enough, and his alone, but more recent epochs were painfully confused. He found that he half resented Laurie, for... for what? For staying silent? For dying? For separating him from Andrew even now?

(Once, when they were in bed together, Ralph had let slip Laurie's name. Andrew's only response had been a sort of longing sigh; that simple revelation of common feeling, which should not have come as any surprise, had raised in him a confusing flare of jealousy.)

Andrew stayed silent as the train passed through Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road. He was in one of his contemplative moods, from which he could be roused only with difficulty. Ralph had no idea what he might be thinking.

When they left Holborn it was still raining, a cold, persistent October drizzle. Ralph unfurled his umbrella and Andrew stepped underneath. The intimacy of walking shoulder to shoulder--into the lion's den--helped Ralph nerve himself to make another attempt.

"This won't be like your Quaker parties. Too many queers about for that."

In the blackout he couldn't see Andrew's face, but he thought that Andrew had moved a little closer to him.

"I think," Andrew said, "that I shall be glad of it, glad not to have to pretend for once. About you and I."

This statement seemed, to Ralph, another unwelcome distraction from the task at hand.

"You wait till you meet Sandy's lot. Don't say I didn't warn you. We won't stay long."

Andrew brushed his hand against Ralph's, as if in reassurance, and said nothing.

Together they climbed the four flights of stairs to Alec's attic flat. Andrew took the steps at a fast, efficient clip, almost faster than Ralph would have done if he had been alone. Never again, thought Ralph, would he have to wait for Laurie to catch up. 

Alec was at the door as soon as they knocked. "Come in, you two," he said, then turned confidentially to Ralph: "I told him that it had better be a _small_ party. So far it seems to be as advertised."

"Bloody well hope so."

"I gave him the guest list. He doesn't know very many people in London."

"How long has he been here, a week? That's plenty."

Alec clicked his tongue lightly. He turned to Andrew, who presented the bottle of tonic water which was their sole contribution to the festivities.

"Happy birthday, Alec. Another year wiser."

"Too kind, thank you. Now let me introduce you... where has he got to..."

As if he had been summoned ( _speak of the devil_ , thought Ralph), Sandy suddenly appeared at Alec's elbow. He seemed at once proud, blissfully happy, and entirely unwilling to meet Ralph's gaze. Instead he looked glancingly at Andrew from under those white eyelashes of his. 

Introductions were made. Only afterwards did Sandy seem to remember that he was holding two glasses. "This is for you, Ralph," he said, handing one over. "Don't worry, I remember, I haven't drowned it. And do you...?"

"He doesn't either," said Andrew, to whom the last had been addressed. 

Just as he spoke, Alec reached out to pluck the glass from Ralph's hand. The rapturous scent of gin and bitters wafted upwards; he could hardly bear to see it go.

"So sorry," said Sandy cheerfully, "how could I forget? That'll be your tonic then."

It was not so much that Ralph wished the ground would open up and swallow him. He wished it would swallow Sandy. Once and for all.

"My tonic as well," said Andrew.

"Don't let's stand here by the door," put in Alec. "Do come through. I'll introduce you around."

It was certainly a small party, as such things were reckoned, barely more than a dozen men fitting themselves into Alec's cramped studio flat. (In the corner, a folding partition discreetly screened Alec and Sandy's bed from the fray. It seemed, mercifully, to be unoccupied.) There were a few colleagues from Barts: another doctor, a pharmacist, and one orderly who seemed to know Andrew already. A young man, the brother of a Bridstow friend, who said he'd had pleurisy as a child and was reading economics at the LSE. A musician from one of the flats downstairs, who performed with ENSA. A scattering of officers on leave. 

All in all it felt far more a circle of friends than Sandy's Bridstow open houses had ever been. The only false note was struck by a young Welsh guardsman, who said he'd been treated by Alec at Barts, though Ralph suspected that more than medical attentions had been involved. There was also a pair of faded old queens whom Sandy had apparently collected at Sadlers Wells, but they didn't seem the sort to do anyone any harm.

"He does have a way of bringing back strays," said Alec when Ralph got a moment alone with him. "He feels for them."

Neither of them needed to mention the fact that one of those strays had been Laurie.

"You're honeymooning again. You make him sound as though he were St. Francis of Assisi."

"People do grow up, Ralph. Besides which, it's been lonely without him. You of all people ought to understand that."

"I wouldn't have thought you'd had the time to be lonely," said Ralph wryly.

They looked over to where Sandy was in the middle of an elaborate story, surrounded by Alec's medical colleagues, his manner full camp. "She sat there on the examination table and said, 'but, my dear, I'm never seen _anywhere_ without my wig.' To which I replied, 'well, duckie, you should see me in mine'..."

Alec looked back to Ralph. "How is Andrew finding it all?"

It occurred to Ralph that he'd been several minutes without wondering how Andrew was getting on. He felt abruptly that he ought to be arraigned for dereliction of duty. Glancing around, he saw that a few couples had begun to dance, a stage in the evening that he had hoped to avoid. Then he spotted Andrew at the other side of the room, deep in conversation with the musician and the two queens.

"Did you know," the boy was saying earnestly, "that Tchaikovsky was...?"

The last word was lost in general laughter.

"Darling," said one of the queens, " _everyone_ knows that."

One could see the scarlet of Andrew's blush from halfway across the room.

Ralph made a rapid sortie, fetched up at Andrew's side. He was unable to keep himself from placing a protective hand at the small of his back, earning for his trouble a knowing look from the musician in addition to Andrew's usual affectionate smile.

"We'd best be going."

"Had we?"

"It's late."

Ralph had used as imperative a tone has he dared. Andrew followed him instinctively halfway to the door; then he stopped and looked back at the little space that had been cleared in the middle of the room. Andrew's orderly friend was dancing with the LSE student. The song was 'People Will Say We're in Love.' Both their eyes were closed, shutting out the world.

"Don't let's go yet," said Andrew. "I had never thought of being able to dance with you. Isn't that odd? It shows what assumptions we make about the world."

Ralph had no ready answer to give. So many things which one never thought.

"But I think I'd like to," Andrew added, more decisively. "Am I meant to ask you? Or you me?"

"Either way," said Ralph. "Hell, why not. Shall we?"

As they stepped together there was a brief moment of confusion, a collision of hands.

"Here," said Ralph, "you-- No. I'll follow. It's simpler."

It would give rise, he suspected, to all sorts of gossip, only some of which would be untrue. Certainly it would have done in Bridstow. But he didn't much care.

Andrew lost some of his awkwardness once he had been granted the familiar role. It was more difficult for Ralph, not having tried things this way round since a rather wild party on a passenger liner bound for Quebec City in 1938. Being sober helped, though he hated to admit it.

"Sorry," said Andrew.

"My fault," said Ralph.

As the song wore on they relaxed into one another. Ralph drew Andrew closer, overcome by that fierce, protective love which overwhelmed all self-consciousness. Andrew, though he was leading, forgot himself and laid his head on Ralph's shoulder. Someone put on some Glenn Miller. They carried on dancing.

Out of the corner of his eye Ralph could see Alec and Sandy standing and looking on. Sandy's arm was around Alec's waist.

"Ralph must really love him," said Sandy, his tone half bitchy and half wistful.

"He does," said Alec. "Of course he does. Sandy, would you like to dance?"

Ralph let slip not a flicker of expression to show that he had overheard. He made not a whisper of complaint when, waltzing with more grandeur than subtlety, Sandy elbowed him in the small of the back. For the moment he could feel generous even towards Sandy Reid.


	2. Chapter 2

The final months of 1943 wore on. If it had not been wartime, punctuated by the occasional air raid, one could almost have called it monotony: Ralph with his Navy duties, living vicariously through others' voyages, and Andrew with his medical ones. With the slackening of the raids there was less call for ambulance drivers, so he had returned to his work as an orderly, this time at Barts. Ralph knew that he felt keenly a sense of his own superfluity. Both of them did, in their own ways, but there was nothing to be done other than to carry on.

Ralph had taken Alec's advice to heart, as far as he was able. Whenever the subject of military service came up, he bit his lip and said nothing. But it hardly seemed to come up at all. Andrew's moral doubts had gone with him to Meeting and, apparently, stayed there.

Ralph was not unconscious of the blessing that fate had conferred in allowing them to remain together for so long. This was the longest that he had been ashore since his schooldays; it was his longest stretch of domesticity since he had been sent away to school at seven. Andrew, after the early deaths of his mother and grandmother, had drifted hither and thither with the vicissitudes of fortune. Neither of them had known for years what it meant to have a home to call one's own.

Forestalled once by Alec's claustrophobia, and again by Laurie's death, Ralph had been all the more determined to succeed with Andrew in making a home. In the previous year Andrew had finally moved from his shared house in the East End into the flat that Ralph had rented. Now Ralph could not imagine living any other way. 

His Georgian print of a frigate under sail, a gift from Alec, hung over the gas fire. Andrew's old carriage rug lay neatly folded on the bed that they shared. Ralph did most of the cooking and Andrew the cleaning, scrubbing earnestly at the teacups with hands already work-roughened by his orderly duties. If they did not go to bed together and wake up together, it was only because of the continued incompatibility of their schedules. All in all, Ralph supposed, this must be how contentment felt.

One January morning Andrew came home earlier than usual. Ralph lay abed listening to the bath running downstairs. Finally Andrew appeared, creeping quietly into the blacked-out bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist.

"I'm not asleep," said Ralph.

Outside it was barely past dawn, but he could still see the smile spread across Andrew's face. Andrew sat on the edge of the bed, its springs creaking lightly.

"Good," he said. "I've wanted to talk to you about something. Though perhaps this isn't the best time."

"Mmm?" said Ralph, drawing him down for a kiss.

"Not that sort of talk, sorry."

"Come to bed in any case. It's cold. You'll catch your death."

Ralph put out his arm expectantly and Andrew slid under the covers, into his embrace. They moved together with easy familiarity. Andrew was still warm from the bath and smelt only faintly of carbolic.

"Well?" said Ralph. "Go on, before I get too distracted."

Andrew took a breath. "I've decided to enlist in the Non-Combatant Corps."

It was not what he had been expecting to hear, not at all. Ralph blinked upwards at the dim ceiling. He grasped Andrew's sturdy, bare shoulder, wanting to remind himself of the reality of the boy who lay beside him.

"What brought this on?" he said finally.

"I felt I had to do something. You know. You've felt it as much as I."

If it had not been dark, Ralph would have forced himself to smile. He was glad that he did not have to. "Non-Combatant Corps. Not the Navy, then."

"Royal Army Medical Corps, 6th Airborne. They've decided to allow COs to join the parachute ambulance units. It'll mean still being an orderly, in the end, but I'll be able to work in the line. By next week, if all goes according to plan, I shall be Private Raynes."

"Jesus Christ," said Ralph.

"When I had my Board I refused Non-Combatant service, you know. I thought--we thought, that is, because now I realise it was the opinion of Dave and the others as much as my own--we thought that supporting the military machine in that way was almost as bad as doing the killing oneself. I wouldn't be a part of it."

"You know what I think of that," Ralph replied automatically.

"It's what I believed," said Andrew. "But I was very young then. Now I think I shall be glad to help in any way I can."

"Yes."

He could think of nothing else to say.

"You're hurting me," said Andrew suddenly.

Ralph forced himself to loose his grip from Andrew's shoulder. His hand had been unconsciously tightening, hard enough to bruise. Andrew rubbed at the spot. 

There was a long silence.

When Andrew finally spoke, his tone brimmed with hurt. "I thought you might be happy." 

"Do you know why they ask for volunteers for something like that? Because it's a bloody awful, dangerous job that no one wants and they expect them to get mown down. Parachutists. Bomb disposal. That's the only real work they want conchies to do, like being a stretcher-bearer during the Great War."

"Dave was," said Andrew, his voice sticking so hard that he barely got the words out.

"I don't give a damn about Dave. Hell, Andrew, can't you see that it's suicide?"

Andrew's body had tensed, as though he were ready to spring into the fight immediately. "Not at all," he said. "Quite the opposite."

"Don't play silly buggers."

"Don't be a hypocrite," Andrew flung back at him.

Abruptly the room seemed boiling hot. Ralph flung back the carriage rug and got quickly out of bed. The cold air struck him as soon as he did. He stood there, feeling the gooseflesh rising on his bare skin, wishing that he could drown himself and his foolish loves in the numbing sea.

"I see now that you and Dave are alike," Andrew added. His voice was quieter but the words stung even more. "You both think you know what's best for me."

"I'll be late for work," said Ralph.

He pulled a uniform off the rail in the wardrobe and went to dress in the sitting room. Andrew did not come after him.

***

When he returned to the flat that evening, rather later than usual, he found Andrew drinking a cup of tea and listening to Mozart. At least he was reasonably sure that it was Mozart. He put down the bags he was carrying and cleared his throat.

Andrew looked up. "I wondered whether you'd gone out after work. I wouldn't have blamed you, exactly. I was very unkind this morning. I can't think what got into me."

"You were right, of course; you usually are. Your life is your own business and you haven't the slightest need to take advice from me. One would have thought that by now I'd learned not to meddle in what doesn't concern me."

"But it does concern you," said Andrew softly.

Ralph took the bags and went to sit beside Andrew on the settee. "As it happens, I did go out. I thought that if you were going to enlist, the least I could do was make sure that you were properly kitted out for training. So I went to the Army and Navy Stores and got a few things."

After tearing himself away from the sextants and barometers, he had spent far too long lingering there, trying to think of all the small things that would make Andrew's life easier and more comfortable. Warm socks (he would simply have to spend the rest of the year darning his own), a small mess kit, a Swiss army knife, a precious box of Darjeeling, a few other little items. And a stationery set in a tidy, waterproof tin.

"Thank you so much," said Andrew, riffling through the blank, creamy sheets. "I shall write every day."

"Just as long as you think of the censor."

Andrew gave him a puzzled look.

"Don't send your love, for instance." It was a perfectly dispassionate explanation, an important fact of which Andrew must be made aware, but Ralph found that he had a lump in his throat. "I'll take it as written."

"You know," said Andrew, "don't you, you must know--how much I'll miss you?"

"Yes," said Ralph gently. "I do."

Andrew put the stationery aside. It lay unregarded beside them on the settee.

***

Within the fortnight Andrew had departed for training, off to the north. The carriage rug had gone with him; Ralph now shivered under the wool blanket that he had bought years ago in Halifax. He went to bed alone and he got up alone, and there was no point in making a pot of tea in the morning when there was no Andrew coming home from the hospital. On two shelves in the wardrobe sat Andrew's civilian clothes, neatly folded. Ralph hadn't the heart to pack them away. They still smelt of him.

Alec drifted by from time to time, concerned, but preoccupied with his own life and his own lover. Sandy was apparently a going concern, and Ralph knew well enough to keep his mouth shut, in this as in other matters. If Andrew had not been away, Ralph might well have distanced himself more from Alec. What need to go out when you had all you needed at home? But once again he had nothing at home, so he accepted most of Alec and Sandy's invitations, wondering privately whether they saw him as a charity case.

That winter evening he was expected at their flat, so he let himself in. He heard the sound of quarreling a bare second after he had turned the doorknob.

"What a reckless, silly, dramatic thing to have done!" Alec was shouting as Ralph came in.

Ralph swept the room quickly with his gaze. Though Sandy looked very pale he could see no sign of blood. 

"I'm interrupting," Ralph said.

Alec turned to him immediately, but Sandy kept his eyes fixed on his lover as though he were the only man in the room. 

"He's taken a leaf from your boy," said Alec in an accusatory tone, "and gone and joined the RAMC."

Sandy's eyes were painfully bloodshot; he had been crying. "I shall never be a surgeon like you if I stay in England," he said to Alec. "I shall be a GP all of my days."

"Your days will be a good lot shorter this way."

"I don't care!" said Sandy passionately. "I wanted you to be proud of me!"

Ralph felt that, without some intervention, the quarrel would continue without taking any account of his presence. He cleared his throat. 

Sandy turned to him. "They're giving me a commission," he said, pleading his case. "I'll be a Lieutenant. I'll have command of a whole section."

Ralph could not imagine anything worse than being under the command of Lieutenant Sandy Reid but he said nothing. Andrew, he reminded himself, would tell him that there was good still to be found in Sandy. One could still see the waxy scar on his forearm from the time he had put out that incendiary at Bridstow Hospital. It partially covered over the scars of an earlier date.

The story came out over tea (for Ralph) and a good stiff drink (for Alec and Sandy). Sandy had not only joined the RAMC; he had followed in the footsteps of Andrew and volunteered for the Parachute Ambulance Corps. However Alec might feel about it now, the thing could not be undone, for Sandy had gone ahead and signed his papers without consulting anyone else.

"What on earth are you going to tell your mum?" said Alec.

"I hadn't thought of that," said Sandy. He looked as though he were once more about to be overwhelmed by tears.

Ralph could see that the whole thing was still perilously close to breakdown; it was only his presence that was keeping matters on a relatively even keel. He didn't much like playing the role, but he sat and quietly sipped his tea while the two of them argued it out. At least nothing was being thrown.

If he'd been drinking perhaps his patience would have been greater. As it was, it lasted as long as the cup of tea, which was rather dainty.

"Look," he said, "what's done is done. It can't be helped now. If Sandy's been a fool then no doubt it'll dawn on him in due course."

Alec and Sandy both blinked at him. Sandy opened his mouth to begin to remonstrate.

"I did say 'if'," Ralph continued. "You may be a hero yet, how the the hell would I know? But I'll tell you one thing: if Andrew were here now, and not in training already, we wouldn't be wasting what little time we had together with abusing one another."

"But..." said Sandy.

"You're right, of course," said Alec slowly.

"I'll see myself out."

As he went down the stairs he thought of Alec and Sandy together, and the longing he felt for Andrew was almost palpable. He had to wait in the foyer, getting control of himself, before he could go out into the street.

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_I thought that I would be prepared for the medical corps after my time as an orderly, but I wasn't reckoning with Army drill. It is very difficult to submit oneself to the will of another; the whole process is designed to crush one's individuality, which is no good for military work. I imagine you will know about all of this already. I find my spirit rebels against it although I know it must be necessary. It reminds me very strongly of school, though the school I went to in the end was not nearly so regimented as this._

_Having worked in an E.M.S. hospital I find the men here very familiar. They are a good sort on the whole, and I feel for those who are unhappy to have been assigned to the parachutists. Not everyone had the choice to volunteer, as I did, and having made the choice freely is a great comfort to me._

_I am far from being the only c.o. in the unit. You might be interested to know that we even have a few Plymouth Brethren. Some of the others are Friends, and worked together in bomb disposal before coming here, but they have been very welcoming to me. During the longer route marches we have had some good conversations. They say that the Army is a sort of university and I can see why._

_Sandy's news must have come as a great shock. If you think it will be any comfort, please tell Alec that I will keep them both in my prayers. Will you please send Sandy's details, so that I can write?_

_I am thinking of you and missing you._

_Andrew_

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_We had today what they call a 'roman candle': a man's parachute failed to open. He was, of course, killed instantly. I knew him rather well. It was all fairly ghastly but I remind myself that I shall be seeing very many more ghastly things before too long._

_We have 48 hours to wait while the inquiry is conducted. I expect that it will turn out to be just a terrible accident, as these things happen sometimes. Everyone tells me that it is very rare. I've met some of the WAAFs who pack the parachutes and I know they understand the seriousness of their work._

_Please don't worry._

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

A young man in the khaki of an Army uniform was limping towards him along the narrow country lane, his cap pulled down to his eyes. _Laurie_ , was Ralph's first thought, a jolt of pent-up longing so strong he could hardly bear it. _Christ almighty, it's Laurie_. 

It was the dream that is so common after a death: some bureaucratic error, some confusion in the lists of heaven, so that the beloved returns laughing and almost whole, gently reproving the lover for the mistake of his grief. It had happened to Ralph once in the waking world, at the most unpromising of birthday parties. Perhaps for that reason he believed it a moment too long. 

Laurie's shade departed when Ralph saw the NCC badge on the young man's shoulder. Andrew took off his cap and smiled his usual open, affectionate smile. He was still limping.

"What have you done to yourself?" said Ralph, blinking the memories away.

Two weeks of parachute training at RAF Ringway and Andrew was already among the walking wounded. His 24 hour leave, and Ralph's visit, could not have come soon enough, at least as far as Ralph was concerned.

"It's just a sprain," replied Andrew easily. "Last jump I landed a bit awry, you'd be amazed at how easy it is to do that, especially if there's any wind. It was very clumsy of me; I'm not the most adept when it comes to landing. But they tell me it'll be good as new by--by the time it all kicks off."

'It.' The long-awaited second front. 

Ralph could not say anything of what he knew about the preparations for Operation Neptune, which had been absorbing so much of his time. Andrew, if he had been told anything on his end, was under the same prohibition. So they walked together down the lane, their uniform sleeves just brushing, each knowing what the other's silence meant.

No doubt Andrew would have been happy to remain in that state of quiet communion. It was a golden afternoon. They walked through a village, past the small inn where Ralph had reserved a room for the night, and carried on as if the day would never end. Going nowhere in particular.

Eventually Ralph began to prompt Andrew with small questions: the food, the barracks, the other men, all the preoccupations of a new soldier. Andrew answered dreamily at first, his mind elsewhere, and then warmed to his theme. His innate generosity of spirit meant that he was far kinder to the Army than it probably deserved.

"Some of the officers are very good to us," said Andrew. "I hadn't expected that. Even if they find us amusing as well. One of them told me that he had never had soldiers who argued so much when they got an order they didn't agree with."

"Well," said Ralph, "I don't think I ever did have a matelot who argued as much as you do. Nor an officer, come to that."

"I suppose not. But whatever they think of us, we'll all be in it together eventually, and that's a consolation."

Ralph supposed that it was, but not much of one. Not for him. One would have thought that he had never said goodbye to a man who was going off to fight.

"You'll be the best soldier they could have had." It was not what he wanted to say at all. "Best medic, if you prefer. You know that."

Andrew smiled. Trustingly he linked arms with Ralph, as if they'd been two schoolboys strolling together down to the cricket fields.

"I don't like to leave you," he said confidentially, as if in reply to what Ralph had not said. "I wouldn't, not for anything but this."

For a moment Ralph tightened his hold on Andrew, pulling him closer. Then he released him once again.

"Time we were heading back," he said. "You ought not to walk too much on that ankle."


	3. Chapter 3

_Dear Ralph,_

_I saw S. the other day and, as we both had leave coming up, he invited me to a party being thrown by an acquaintance of his in Manchester. Most of the other guests were officers. You will know what I mean when I say that it was rather a queer party. One of them said to me that he thought very many COs were--it is not as though I hadn't heard it said before, in the newspapers even, but it was a surprise to hear it in that company. (Especially as I don't think it was meant as an insult.) I said that I thought the two things had nothing to do with one another but afterwards I wondered whether I might not be wrong._

_No doubt you will say that I'm being silly but I would welcome the chance to hear it from you, if it meant seeing you face to face._

_By the end of the party S. was in a state, saying that A. is not faithful to him while he's away, and that you would know. Of course I told him there was nothing in it. If there is anything else, can you write and say so?_

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_Have you read any of Forster? He was recommended to me by a friend of Sandy, a doctor in my unit in fact, and I am getting on with him greatly._

_Of course I trust you. That is all that needs to be said._

_Andrew_

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_The weather is glorious._

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

That last was, of course, their agreed signal that Andrew's unit was about to be sent into action. Ralph supposed that he could have guessed it just as well without the letter. After a few days of bad weather the boats were finally being pushed out on 5 June, which Ralph knew full well. 

If only he could have imagined Andrew aboard one of the flotilla of ships crossing the Channel, some destroyer or landing craft or merchant vessel pressed into service, any ship within his tiny corner of knowledge, he would have felt... not better, no. He knew the risks only too well. But he would have felt responsible and that was at least a feeling with which he was familiar. It would have been something to grasp hold of.

As it was the letter didn't arrive until the 7th. By then Andrew's rounded handwriting seemed almost a mockery. He had been flown from somewhere in England, dropped somewhere over France, into fire, defenceless, and now he was... Who the hell knew?

Ralph worked himself beyond exhaustion as the Navy ships patrolled up and down the Channel. He did not go home until he was sent there. He took with him a bottle of rum and drank himself into oblivion. After so long without alcohol, it came sooner than he had expected.

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_I am safe. I've lost track of how many casualties we've treated over the past few days. We were under mortar fire at the rendezvous point, and for some time we couldn't reach the [CENSORED]. But Roger says we can be proud of the work that we've done and I think so too._

_I don't know how quickly this letter will reach you or where we'll be sent next. But I am always thinking of you and I will write again as soon as I'm able._

_Andrew_

***

Two months Andrew was on the Continent, that summer. Letters trailed back across the Channel, tattered scraps ripped from the vast fabric of wartime experience. Ralph had written his own dispatches from the front lines, wedged into his bunk during a ghastly storm as the trawler rolled through all the degrees of motion. _Dear Alec, Nothing much to report, we've seen bugger all. The weather has closed in a bit…_

In the inarticulate simplicity of Andrew's letters he could read exhaustion, lack of time, the conflict between honesty and censorship. More than that, the desire to share his emotions warred with the essential impossibility of describing life on the front. Ralph told sailors' yarns with the best of them, but he knew as well as anyone that there were stories one could never really tell.

And then there was the other question. _Dear Alec, This sublieutenant of mine is a good chap…_

Ralph could read between the lines, trace every offhanded reference: _Roger had a difficult case the other day, Roger gave me some benzedrine though I didn't use it in the end, Roger says that I shouldn't worry_. It was this doctor, an officer of course, the one who had lent Andrew the complete works of E. M. Forster. No doubt Andrew thought it was all completely aboveboard.

He spent those unbearably long summer evenings struggling through _A Room with a View_ and _Howards End_ , a rapidly emptying bottle at his elbow. He suspected that they would have made little sense to him even if he hadn't been drinking again. Even if he hadn't been listening for the buzz of 'doodlebugs' droning over London.

Finally he took the books to Alec. They were dogeared with turned-down pages; he could not remember what he had meant to mark. He could barely remember reading them.

"Not your usual taste in literature, is it?" said Alec. "But yes, I've read both."

"He'll be back on leave soon. I don't need much, I just want something sensible to say. It's what he's been discussing with that doctor friend of his."

"Ralph," said Alec gently, "Andrew wouldn't love you any less if you told him you didn't give a damn about Forster."

"Laurie would have known about it. I'm sure Laurie did know about it."

"He doesn't expect you to be Laurie either, any more than you expect him to be Laurie."

All of this was far too philosophical for Ralph in his current mood.

"It's not that I think he's fucking him." The syntax was confused, not worth the effort of untangling, but he knew what he meant. "Andrew wouldn't. But that's because Andrew is a saint."

Alec declined to weigh in on the question of Andrew's saintliness. "Do you know, Sandy thinks that you and I are. Fucking, that is."

"I do know. Andrew wrote and told me, months ago now."

"I didn't realise it had got that far," said Alec, chuckling.

"It's not funny."

"Isn't it? It's certainly not true."

"Just tell me something about Forster," said Ralph. "I haven't the patience for the rest."

Three days before Andrew was due home on leave, Ralph poured all the alcohol in the flat down the sink. It had only been a short drunk. 

After that he finished reading _A Room with a View_.

***

In retrospect it seemed as if they spent most of that week of leave together in bed. No mention of Roger, nor of Alec. No mention, blessedly, of Forster. With the intensity of their reunion all serious conversation evaporated into the ether. They lay entangled in one another and said very little.

The war only touched them in the small hours of the morning. Andrew would awake with a start, gasping for breath.

"I'm sorry," he said, abashed. "I don't sleep as well as I used."

Ralph wiped the sweat from Andrew's brow, kissed him, soothed him back to sleep. These small things gave him inordinate pleasure, as if he could lift, even temporarily, the weight of experience from his lover's shoulders.

***

On the last morning of Andrew's leave, they lay a long while abed together. The sun was high in the sky by the time that Ralph realised it was a Sunday.

"Aren't you going to Meeting?"

"I don't think I will," said Andrew thoughtfully.

This was unheard of.

"Why, what have they converted you to over there? Don't tell me you've become a Buddhist. I once knew a man who did."

"Nothing. I'm still a Friend. But having joined the NCC... going to Meeting in uniform... I don't feel it would be right."

"I've never known you not to have the courage of your convictions."

"Oh, I do," said Andrew. "But it's been easy for me, relatively. Wearing a uniform is something that not everyone feels able to do; I wouldn't want to flaunt that in front of them. It's the absolutists who have it hardest of all."

"I would hardly call Normandy easy."

"And yet in a way it has been. That's what frightens me most. I've been so proud of being a parachutist, one of the Red Devils. I've been so proud of my comrades, even knowing that they're taking lives. Perhaps that's the lesson of experience, and perhaps you'll say it's only right, but I believe that everyone has to make that decision for themselves. My interference could only hurt."

"I've heard that before, my dear. Said it, even, which is why I know it's nonsense. Weren't you the one who told Laurie that you shouldn't have your head stuck in a bag? It's the same thing."

"Do you think it is?" Andrew sighed. "Perhaps. Perhaps I do feel guilty, after all."

"That's what comes of living," said Ralph.

"And one has to live. I've always known that, whatever else I've questioned."

For a moment they embraced, two lovers amidst the corrupting, uncertain maelstrom of the world. Ralph felt Andrew's breath warm against his neck. _We have this_ , he thought fiercely. _This is what it's worth living for. This is what it means_.

"You're right about Meeting," said Andrew some time later. "Really it's Dave. He's the one who won't want to see me in uniform, and I know he won't. We had a bit of a row before I left. My enlisting was the last straw; I don't think that he felt he could forgive it."

"Very Christian of him."

Dave had despaired (to hear Andrew tell it) over Andrew's decision to leave the East End and share a flat with Ralph. One could only assume that he had known exactly what it meant. Now Ralph found it strangely disappointing to learn that military enlistment was ranked somewhere above sodomy in Dave's Quakerly catalogue of sin. What a long catalogue it must be, full of additions, annotations and cross-references, with certain pages dog-eared and worn by frequent perusal.

"It has to do with my father. Dave has always wanted me to live up to his memory; somehow I feel that he's always been disappointed in me because of it."

"You're not your father. Neither is Dave, incidentally."

"That's what I told him. Not very Christian of me, you might say."

"I wouldn't," said Ralph. "Dave was in love with him."

"He told me when he needed to. Partly I felt that I'd already known. I... I've tried to tell myself that it doesn't matter. That it... that he put it out of his head..."

Andrew's voice faltered. He shook his head. There comes a moment when one is poised on a precipice between two equally steep descents. Ralph could see that for Andrew it was so, struggling still with the notion that he had been loved and valued, at a time in his life when it had mattered very much to him, only for another man's virtues. A word from Ralph could be enough to sink Dave for good. And he was sorely tempted.

"I know he'll want to see you before you go," said Ralph gently. "He will have missed you."

***

By September Andrew was back in his training camp, gone as if he'd never been home, leaving only the ghost of a hollow in the wrinkled sheets.

One sunny morning Ralph was shaving in the bathroom when he heard footsteps quickly passing by, and then an urgent knocking half a flight above. Towel in hand, Ralph looked round the door. Alec was standing outside the flat, nervously tapping his foot. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his trousers.

"Christ, Alec, what can you want at this hour of the morning?"

Alec turned blankly towards him. His face was very white.

"He's dead."

In a split second Ralph's world burnt to ashes. A moment later he would have been beyond noticing that Alec had begun to cry. Blood rushed hotly to his face, grief and rejoicing mingled so confusedly together that only instinct saved him.

Ralph took the stairs two at a time, wiping at his face with the towel. He pulled open the door with still-slippery hands and bundled Alec through into the flat.

"Sandy is dead," Alec repeated, as numb as a sleepwalker.

Looking closely now, he could see the little signs of disorder: tousled hair, tie askew, the nick on Alec's cheek with toilet paper still clinging to it. Ralph wondered that he had managed the job at all. He grasped Alec's arms with both hands.

"My dear," said Ralph. "Sit down, you look as if you might faint. I'll get you a drink."

It took two downstairs neighbors before Ralph could beg a half-empty bottle of whisky. After that a phone call to his superior, clipped words about a 'family emergency.' When he got back to the flat, Alec was sitting in one of the armchairs with his face in his hands, weeping brokenly as Ralph had never heard him do.

"Tell me," Ralph said, pouring out two glasses of whisky.

Alec could get the words out only in disconnected fragments. "At Arnhem… His mother called… He stayed behind… Oh God."

Ralph put the glasses down on the carpet. He perched on the arm of the chair, putting an arm around Alec's shoulder.

"I loved him," Alec kept saying, with the infuriating, self-justifying clarity of grief. "I loved him, Ralph."

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_The news has come as a terrible shock. I feel in some way responsible, though I tell myself that Sandy was capable of making his own decisions. He died in a good cause. I know that much._

_Please give my condolences to Alec and to Sandy's family. I wish I could be at the funeral._

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

It would not be a funeral. Sandy had been buried in Arnhem where he had fallen.

He came from Edinburgh, one of a close-knit, emotional family of five. Ralph would not have known any of them from Adam. The two-day leave he wangled from his superiors--more half truths delivered in his straightest tone--was purely on Alec's account and not out of any special regard for Sandy's memory.

All that conjured was the image of a bathtub swimming with blood. The dead weight of Sandy's slippery, pale, ungraspable body, soaking mercilessly into his uniform. A flippant voice saying _come over here and see what we've got for you_. The smell of Dettol, Alec's laboring over fine stitches in the dim light, Laurie-- _Odell, Odell_ \--passed out across the hall. Alec, accusingly, years later: _he's gone and taken a leaf from your boy_. Tears, more tears, blurring everything into one.

Throughout the service--Church of Scotland, in the New Town--he sat to rigid attention in a wooden pew. The church was full, family and friends and parishioners paying their respects to a promising young local boy whose career as a doctor had been cut untimely short. It surprised Ralph not at all to learn that Sandy's father had been a doctor too.

More surprising (though perhaps it should not have been) was that Sandy had died, if not a decorated war hero, then as close to one as made no difference. A letter was read out from a fellow doctor describing how he had worked for days in a dressing station under German fire, and had been killed attempting to bring a wounded man to safety after one of his stretcher-bearers had been shot.

"I told him not to be a hero," said Alec in a despairing undertone, right in the middle of the eulogy. "It was just the sort of thing he would have done."

Not for the first time Ralph wondered whether heroism was a matter of a moment's impulse as much as of virtue and discipline. Perhaps it didn't matter. It was exactly the sort of the thing Sandy would have done, that was undeniable. And what more could one ask of a man? 

He squeezed Alec's arm, a brief, dry motion with his bad hand. Too many heroes, that was the trouble. He prayed that Andrew would have more sense than to succumb to the instinct. 

The reception afterwards was something to be endured. Even the sad optimism of the rationed buffet spread seemed a Reid trademark. The elder Dr. Reid talked of the general practice in Finchley as though Sandy had been a renowned surgeon. Sandy's three sisters spoke of him with reverence, in tones unnervingly familiar, and wept as freely as Sandy had once done. The middle sister collapsed in hysterics and had to be brought outside for air. 

Ralph stayed by Alec's side, thinking to protect him from any possible awkwardness. It was a feeling that he knew well: the superfluousness of the unacknowledged lover. His own position was even more tenuous. Ralph hoped that he would not be called upon to offer any testimonials to his nonexistent friendship with Sandy.

He went away for a moment to get Alec and himself another drink. When he returned he found that Mrs. Reid had taken Alec aside.

"You meant everything to him," she was saying, clasping Alec's hands in her own. "We can't be too grateful."

Alec said something that Ralph could not make out, his usual charm dimmed by grief.

"You'll always be a son to us. Remember that."

Now Ralph turned away, feeling almost ill. To have heard such a thing from Laurie's mother--never. Nor would he have wanted to. Why did he feel as if he had been punched in the stomach? He stood alone, downing his drink quickly. To an end to funerals.

Worst of all was the journey back to London by sleeper train. Ralph lay in the top bunk, listening to Alec down below trying to muffle his tears. Every instinct in Ralph's body told him to go to Alec's rescue, to comfort his friend in any way that he could. But he remembered the last funeral he had attended and what had come of the comfort he had offered so freely then. It was nothing that he regretted and nothing that he wished to imperil.

So he lay there, faithful to Andrew in his fashion, thinking of Laurie, while the small hitches and gasps of Alec's grief mingled with the rattle of the train through the night.


	4. Chapter 4

_Dear Ralph,_

_Thank you for your letter of the 8th. Your descriptions of VE Day in London were wonderful and I have read them over many times. It sounds a different world._

_At the moment it seems wrong to even think of going home. Since we arrived here we have mostly been working with displaced persons, and there is so much misery and so much need. We could stay in Germany for another year, or another five, and hardly begin to do the work that is necessary._

_In any case I do not expect to be demobilised quickly. I'm younger than some and have not been serving that long. My release group number is in the fifties, which I imagine you have worked out already. We will see what the future holds. Do you know when you will be demobilised?_

_Could you send me, if you can manage it, a copy of War and Peace? I feel I shall need a long book in the coming months._

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

Twenty-nine days embarkation leave. Generous so far as it went, but it seemed a pittance. After that brief respite the 225th was to be sent into action in the Far East. Malaya? Japan? One hardly knew. It was a cruel reminder that the war was not yet over.

Ralph went to meet Andrew on a platform at Paddington. The train that pulled in was full of paratroopers coming home on leave. He stood, a lone Navy officer, amidst a flood of Army khaki and camouflage. All around him there were reunions, embraces, passionate kisses for all the world to see. Girls squealed. Women wept openly. Husbands held up babies to see how they had grown.

Someone waved at him from down the platform. It was Andrew. He was in his battledress, belt cinched tight at the waist, his maroon beret cocked jauntily. On the shoulder came the badges: RAMC, Airborne, his Parachutists' wings. In that company the Non-Combatant Corps badge was hardly noticeable. Andrew looked very tanned and very fit, his bag slung easily over one shoulder. One did not imagine that he would ever again be ashamed to be asked what he had done during the war. 

In a way that he had never been able to do before, Ralph could suddenly envision Andrew ready to leap into the fray over Normandy, over the Rhine. Unhesitating, unafraid, ready to do what needed to be done. The admiration he felt was so painfully pointed that it could almost have been jealousy.

Andrew's smile was as open and affectionate as it had ever been. "Ralph."

"Andrew. You look well."

Ralph made an abortive move to take Andrew's bag for him, the only gesture of affection that he could think to perform in such a crowd, the only moment of contact he could allow himself.

Andrew's hand tightened on the strap. "It's quite all right," he said.

Ralph felt abruptly foolish. Andrew was young and strong and vital. He needed no help from anyone, least of all from Ralph, with his five years of desk service and his ruined hand.

Andrew's gaze was very direct, expectant. Ralph finally had to tear his eyes away. His glance fell on the sleeve still innocent of rank.

"It's a sin that they haven't promoted you," he said.

Andrew shrugged. "It's a matter of policy, you know. Conchies."

He sounded as though he hardly thought it mattered.

"This way," he added, more gently, "I shall never outrank Laurie."

"Come along," said Ralph. "Let's go home."

Andrew cast a glance down the platform, in the other direction, and then followed Ralph towards the Tube.

***

"My dear," said Ralph, overcome. And then, again, because he could not think of anything else to say: "My dear."

And the evening and the morning were the first day, only they were over and done with in minutes. Ralph would have been content to bask in the afterglow but Andrew, almost indecently vigorous, was ready to press onwards after only the briefest of intervals.

So Ralph lay back and let Andrew make love to him. _Hail the conquering hero_ , he thought wryly, but it was no sacrifice at all. It never had been. Yet there was something defter, more practiced, in Andrew's touch and Ralph found himself wondering who else the boy--boy no longer--had touched while he had been away in the wars. But there was no point thinking about it.

Andrew made an interrogative noise, stilled above him.

"No, it's all right," said Ralph.

Rather than continuing, Andrew lay down beside him. He reached for the packet at the side of the bed, calmly lit two cigarettes, then handed one to Ralph.

"You don't smoke," said Ralph.

"I do now. I suppose it was for want of something to do with my time."

"It's like that."

"It is."

There was a long silence.

"Can't you tell me about it?" said Ralph finally.

"If I started," said Andrew, "I'm not sure I could ever stop."

Before, Ralph had only seen the strength in him, the newfound confidence, but now that he listened he could hear the haunted tone in Andrew's voice.

"You talk as though I hadn't been to war. I do know what it is."

"It was the civilians," said Andrew slowly. "The rest of it was hellish, of course. I expected that it would be. But the women and the children... 'displaced persons,' one is meant to say... It makes me understand how my father must have felt, in 1919. Only I don't think that he ever saw anything like this. I keep telling myself that it wasn't even the worst. Some of the 224th were at Belsen."

Ralph took a deep breath. "Yes."

They lay there until the small hours, smoking their way through the packet of cigarettes, as Andrew unfolded his tales of war. Ralph fought against his own feelings of helplessness, knowing that Andrew's were all the greater for being more immediate. There was nothing he could say; he could only listen.

Eventually the silences grew so long that Ralph thought Andrew had fallen asleep. Looking over, he saw that his grey eyes were still open, gazing up at the ceiling.

"What is it?" said Ralph gently.

Andrew turned towards Ralph, his eyes searching Ralph's face.

"Are you proud of me?" asked Andrew, the other Andrew, the boy whom Ralph had known.

"You don't need to ask me that," said Ralph gruffly. "Come here."

This time, the third time, it went the way he had imagined it.

***

Their polling station was in the church hall just at the end of the road. It felt oddly domestic to be strolling that way with Andrew on that July evening after work. The weather had been changeable all day. The treetops were lit by the setting sun, bright green and gold against piled dark clouds to the west. One could feel the front coming through: a sudden breath of cooler air with a few spits of rain. Ralph raised his collar against the British summertime.

"You'll have voted in '35, of course," said Andrew. "But all this is new to me."

Ralph gave Andrew a look. "I didn't. I'd just shipped out of... was it Buenos Aires? It might have been San Francisco, I don't remember. Can't say I was very interested in politics, then. I'd only been at sea a year. I had other things to worry about."

"We talked of nothing but the election on the way back from the Continent, Roger and I and the other men. I wonder if in ten years time I shan't be able to remember whether I was in Germany, or London, or... or somewhere else."

 _Somewhere else_ loomed very near. Andrew's leave ended in two weeks to the day. The way things were going, ten years' reflection seemed too much to hope for. In that light a political argument appeared a welcome distraction, far preferable to the alternative. 

"You'll be voting Labour, of course."

Andrew nodded matter-of-factly.

"Knowing how much you talk about individual moral choice," Ralph continued, "you'll forgive me for finding that odd. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life living under a command economy? You might as well move to Russia and save the trouble."

"I'm not voting on my own account; I shall land on my feet whatever happens. It's the men I'm thinking of. You know, like the _Mirror_ slogan: 'I'll vote for him!'"

"I'm sure that was meant for soldiers' wives," said Ralph wryly. 

He paused at the entrance to the polling station to hold the door for a young woman coming out with a pram. She gave him a grateful smile; Ralph nodded automatically.

"It doesn't matter who it was meant for," said Andrew, "it's exactly the right sentiment. I can't tell you how many men I know who will be coming home to bombed-out houses, with no job waiting for them, and a wife and children to support. And that's if they don't come home wounded."

"If they come home at all."

"Today I want to think about the election," said Andrew.

"Too right," said Ralph.

In the election booth he made his cross by the Conservative candidate, hoping that Winston would manage to finish the job after all.

***

For Winston the job was finished with the 1945 election; for Ralph the end came only a few months later. He was out of uniform in the early part of 1946, unemployed and washed up ashore. It felt odd for the first time in nearly seven years not to have gold braid at his wrists. 

After a few weeks of determined searching, through a friend of a friend and via rather unconventional channels--they were, perhaps disappointingly, always the most reliable--he had the great good luck to find a post as a Second Mate with Union Castle. He'd shipped with Union Castle before the war, on and off, but was surprised to find that the hand didn't seem to matter. He supposed that officers on passenger liners didn't have much call for hard physical labour. 

He was quickly assigned to the Cape Mail run, South Africa and back again. The ship had been a troopship during the war; it was odd to think that they were being demobilised faster than many of the troops whom they had carried. It was odder still to sit at rather grand formal dinners, after years of rationing, and make pleasant conversation with the passengers. Duty more different from a Royal Navy antisubmarine trawler could not have been imagined. 

It was easy to feel that the intervening years had been no more than a dream. There was something comforting about the strict, predictable routine of a large ship, about waking to a new port and leaving again by schedule. He could have been twenty-four again, running between Avonmouth and Quebec, with an undergraduate Alec waiting for him in Bridstow. Forget the North Sea, a trawler's tiny wardroom and all the responsibilities of a commanding officer. Forget Dunkirk, forget Laurie. Put Andrew out of his mind, for the moment at least. So he told himself.

***

_Dear Ralph,_

_I am so happy for you and could not have asked for better news. I know how long you've been dreaming of being back at sea. You must write from every port._

_We are not traveling in such style. Though I won't say the name for fear of the censor, you will be amused to hear that we are on one of your sister ships. It is difficult to imagine her before the war, or that she will ever return to passenger service. By the time I am finally demobilised I will be almost as much of a world traveler as you._

_Thinking of you._

_Andrew_

***

By the time Andrew was finally demobilised it was well into 1946. He and the 225th had come the long way home, via peacekeeping duties in Singapore and Java and Palestine. Ralph felt that he could hardly begrudge them that service, when the expected alternative had been active combat against the Japanese. He'd arranged his leave so that he arrived back from Cape Town only a few days after Andrew's return.

"Whatever you may say about the bomb," Ralph observed over the newspaper, a few days later, "it saved quite a few lives. Otherwise the war might still be dragging on."

Andrew gave Ralph a mournful, resigned look. "You wouldn't say that if they had dropped it on London."

"I suppose not. If only because I wouldn't be here to say it."

Andrew shook his head. He looked, thought Ralph, very tired, worn by hard duty and tropical sun in a way that was familiar from his own looks in the mirror. Though perhaps some of that was simply age beginning to show: Ralph had to remind himself that Andrew was now twenty-five, no longer the boy whom he had held in his memory from that golden summer day in the Lakes.

"You know," said Andrew, "they offered us weapons training before we went out to the Far East, if we wanted it. Because of the Japanese atrocities against the wounded." He paused a long while. "I took it. I know how to shoot, now."

"You never told me that in your letters." 

Ralph was very aware of having used his 'court-martial' voice. He restrained himself from adding _it would have made me feel a hell of a lot better if you had_.

"I didn't know what I might decide, but I thought I should allow myself the choice if it came down to it. If it was a matter of defending my patients, I might have been tempted. I didn't want to find out; thank God I didn't have to."

Ralph pondered that a long while. He had always been aware that Andrew was pre-eminently a realist. "It was a very brave thing to do."

"I don't think so. But I won't worry about might-have-beens." Andrew shook his head again, this time briskly. "I've been meaning to mention, I had a note from Roger, my friend from the unit. He's asked us for a drink at the A&B in Soho. Have you heard of it?"

He ignored the question; he knew the place only too well. "Did he, in point of fact, say 'us'?"

"I'm sure he meant to," said Andrew.

The question seemed to Ralph a great deal stickier than that of protecting wounded patients, but Andrew had approached it with his usual simple directness. It would have seemed ignoble to offer anything less in return. Telling himself this very firmly, Ralph decided to go with Andrew to the Arts and Battledress.

***

In 1946 it had a good deal less of the battledress and a good deal more of the arts, but it was still the same place that he and Alec had visited for the first time back in '41, which was longevity as far as these things went. A queer place, indisputably, as if the fondness for Forster had not been enough to remove any doubts Ralph might have had about Andrew's friend. It was crowded when they arrived, and Ralph could sense a speculative look or two directed in Andrew's direction. They quickly claimed a table at the back of the bar and kept themselves to themselves.

Ralph spotted Roger Pink the moment he came through the door, because of the sudden glow that spread across Andrew's face. The man himself was not anyone at whom Ralph would have looked twice otherwise. He was in his early thirties, with mousy brown hair already beginning to recede, and a rather beaky nose. One could easily imagine his long, thin hands in surgery, but even Andrew had been more sensible than to carry on wearing his demob suit after returning home.

Roger introduced himself with a hearty handshake, which Ralph instinctively matched.

"Good to meet you finally," said Ralph. "Though from Andrew's letters I feel I know you already."

"Likewise, the famed Lieutenant Lanyon." There was a rather familiar earnestness in his manner. "To hear him talk, you'd been with the 225th all along, and just happened to step away for a quick smoke whenever one of us was around."

"No doubt I should have been, if not otherwise engaged by the Navy." Ralph paused. "I'll get you a drink."

"Oh, I rather think it's my round. A lemonade and...?"

Ralph raised his eyebrows at that. "Two lemonades, thanks."

When Roger went to order the drinks, Andrew transferred his fond look easily from one man to the other, leaning forward to place his hand so that it just brushed Ralph's arm. 

"Do you like him?" asked Andrew confidentially.

"As much as one can tell from two minutes' acquaintance. But didn't you drink beer overseas?"

Andrew ignored this rather thin attempt at deflection. "I hope you will," he said in a tone of entreaty.

When Roger returned, with two glasses of lemonade and a pint, they turned naturally enough to war stories. Ralph listened to the tale of the 225th's march from the Rhine to Wismar on the Baltic Sea.

"Three hundred miles or so, all told," said Roger. "Not that we walked all the way, unlike most of the men. We leap-frogged our way along with the other two ambulance units. We couldn't all be accepting casualties at once."

"We got there just before the Russians," said Andrew. "Or the 3rd Brigade did, at any rate, and we arrived soon after. I don't suppose the Russians would really have pushed on to Denmark, though, would they?"

"I heard they were dead set on Lubeck at least, but who's to know?"

After that there was a brief discussion of Japanese prisoners-of-war in Singapore before Roger and Andrew moved on to Java. In Semarang they'd been given the task of restoring medical services, with water and power cut off by Indonesian guerillas.

"We were there on behalf of the Dutch," said Andrew. "If we hadn't, I imagine it would have been anarchy, but I don't entirely blame the Indonesians for being unhappy to see us. When the Japanese surrendered, they thought they had their chance at last."

"And they were taking it out on the Chinese and the Europeans," said Roger. "It was a hell of a mess. Good preparation for Palestine, one might say."

At this point Ralph became conscious of someone hovering by their table as if nerving himself to make an approach. He was just about to tell the man to shove off when he looked up and realised that it was Alec.

"Why, hullo," said Alec, smiling his most charming smile. It was not directed at Ralph. "I don't believe we've met...?"

After years of experience Ralph could tell perfectly well when Alec was on the prowl, though his taste in men remained rather more mysterious. 

"This is my friend Roger--er, Lieutenant Pink," said Andrew. "Or perhaps it should be Dr. Pink, now? Roger, this is Alec Deacon. He's a doctor at Barts."

Alec pulled up a chair without being asked. "Charmed, I'm sure. You're one of Andrew's lot, then?"

"Absolutely. Well, not a conscientious objector, but I don't suppose that's what you were asking. Nor does it matter. It seems we've been halfway around the world together, isn't that right, Andrew?"

Andrew nodded proudly. "We have."

"Now I've just been demobilised," said Roger. "Looking around for a surgical post, to be honest."

Alec perked up even more, if that were possible. "As Andrew said, I'm at Barts, and we're rather short staffed at the moment. If you'd like me to make a few introductions...?"

Only belatedly did it occur to Ralph to be thankful that Alec had not introduced himself with anything too telling, such as _I hear you're fond of Forster_ , but Alec was not so gauche. Ralph watched the unfolding scene with a certain detached interest; it had been a while since he had seen Alec in action. He operated with the same rapid precision that one imagined him employing in theatre. That charm had all the point of a scalpel. Ralph knew it only too well, having once upon a time been at the business end.

Ralph only happened to glance over at Andrew, whose face was like thunder as he watched the byplay, his jaw firmly set. Ralph had never seen the expression so clearly, so unconcealed. Had the boy really not felt the sting of jealousy before? Only once, Ralph remembered. And what had come of it...

"Another round?" said Ralph, interrupting. "Alec, come and help me."

It was true that carrying four pint glasses at once was a long way beyond him these days. But having got Alec to the far side of the crowded bar, he didn't stop until he'd drawn him out into the drizzly street.

"Hell, Alec, didn't you see what Andrew did to Bunny? You'd better watch your step."

Alec laughed, a relief of tension. "Yes, I'm sorry. I was rather blatant, wasn't I? Taking 'only connect' as my motto. It seemed fitting."

"You planned this," said Ralph flatly.

"No. I hadn't the foggiest you would be here. Though I won't deny that throwing myself on that grenade adds a certain motivation. I thought you'd be rather glad."

"Yes, but Andrew isn't. Take care, won't you? I don't want him hurt. Whatever happens."

"Don't say that, my dear. Don't even think it."

"How can I not?" said Ralph.

When he got back to the table he remembered that he had been meant to be buying the next round. But Andrew was still giving Roger the awkward treatment, and silence reigned. By the time he had judiciously smoothed the conversational waters, Alec had reappeared with all four pints balanced precariously in hand.

"Don't mind me," Alec said. "I like the practice."

Ralph took him at his word and let him distribute the drinks himself. "Andrew, tell Alec what you were just saying about Java."

After that things went more easily. Alec, chastened, did his part to direct talk along more suitable lines. Pulling in harness together, Ralph and Alec were capable discreetly taking charge of most conversations, and it was not as though they had any shortage of material. By the end of the evening one might have called it a convivial table.

When last orders were called Alec spun some line about having to walk in the same direction as Roger for the bus. Ralph was under no illusions in that regard, but at least it made for a clean separation outside of the bar. Andrew held his tongue; who knew what he thought.

"Let's not go straight home," Ralph said after Alec and Roger had pushed off. "Couldn't you use some air?"

So they walked down through Trafalgar Square, turning their steps towards the Embankment. It was still strange to see the sky without its crossing searchlights, and the Houses of Parliament brightly illuminated at the end of Whitehall. Till the end of his days Ralph expected that he would be half listening for air raid sirens and the drone of bombers overhead.

He stopped outside St Martin in the Fields to light a cigarette. He studied Andrew's face by the flare of the lighter.

"You were jealous back there, weren't you?"

"No."

"Might as well cut this short by admitting it. It's plain as day and you're not fooling anyone. Certainly not me. You've been a little bit in love with him."

"A little," admitted Andrew miserably, sounding for the moment not at all like a battle-hardened paratrooper. He reluctantly fell into step as Ralph began walking again.

"Well, it won't be the last time. It's a fact of life."

"I don't understand why you're being so kind about it."

Ralph felt something within him harden at that. "Well, tell me then. How far did it go?"

Andrew stared at him in horror. "Do you think I would have come back to you as if nothing had happened, if I had--if we had--"

"We were apart a long time. Things happen."

"Not those things," said Andrew, that soldiering resolve still oddly mixed with his conchie idealism. "Not to me."

"They do," Ralph insisted.

Andrew's stubbornness evaporated. He looked over and asked, far more gently, a tone that one could imagine him using in a field hospital: "Ralph, is there something that you want to tell me?"

That American flyboy in Piccadilly. The Union Castle steward in Capetown. Ralph had reckoned them as war damage, so far as it went. He did not consider that any excuse, though he very clearly represented to Andrew that there had been nothing of love in either coupling, and an excess of spirits in both.

"Sandy said that you and Alec were like that," Andrew said reflectively when the confession was finished. "He said--but no, I ought not to repeat it."

"Go on."

"He said, _ninety-five percent of queers just can't keep it in their trousers, Andrew, however much they tell you that they love you. The sooner you realise that, the better. Don't have any illusions what he gets up to while you're gone_."

It was a fair imitation of Sandy's tone, an admonition from beyond the grave. Nothing he had said while alive had ever seemed so cogent.

"He was probably right," said Ralph, a leaden feeling in his stomach.

"I told him that I didn't claim to know anything about him and Alec. I didn't want to. That was his business; what was between you and me was mine. But I said that I didn't have any difficulty in trusting you."

"You've always had more faith in me than I deserved."

"No, I don't think so," said Andrew. "But perhaps I've had the wrong sort of faith."

"It was difficult for me. I'm not made for waiting at home." Ralph paused. "But that doesn't excuse anything. I don't expect to be forgiven."

"It's not a matter of forgiveness," Andrew said in a flat, abstracted tone. "You had that already."

So he had believed Sandy. And said nothing.

"It doesn't sound like it."

"I don't know how you'd like me to sound," said Andrew.

They walked in silence until they came to the Embankment. London spread out before them but Ralph had eyes only for the river, slipping black and gold down to the sea. He lit another cigarette. Anything to avoid looking at the man beside him.

"Now that I'm out of the Army," said Andrew finally, more calmly, "I want to go back to the Continent. There's still so much relief work to be done."

It might have seemed a _non sequitur_ but Ralph knew that it followed perfectly well. He noted that Andrew presented this as a thing already decided. The worst of it was that Ralph could not even say it was a surprise. Andrew had given every indication in his letters; now he had additional cause to want to leave Ralph behind. For good this time.

Ralph wondered whether he should simply accept it, make a clean break. _Since there's no hope, come let us kiss and part_. But he couldn't bear the thought that it would end like this, after so much waiting, by the banks of the Thames.

"You know I've this post with Union Castle," he said. "Six weeks at sea and two on leave. We'd never see one another if you went abroad."

"I know," said Andrew. "I've been thinking that. But I'm not made for waiting at home either."

"Is that it, then?"

Silence. Ralph looked over at Andrew but he could not make out his face.

"Andrew," said Ralph sharply, wanting to rouse the boy from his reverie. "Tell me. Don't make me guess. Is it over?"

Andrew shook his head. "Of course not. Not unless you want it to be." He paused. "Why don't you come with me?"

"What?"

"Come with me," Andrew repeated. "You once said something about how we were fighting for human decency; I never forgot that, even though I didn't take it in the way you meant. Just because the war is over, it doesn't mean the fight is done. If there ever was a time to do something for good in the world, this is it. And I want your help."

A pleasant, ordered, lonely life on a passenger liner, with gold braid at his wrists, clear blue water to the horizon, and a pension waiting in the bank. Or the struggle and uncertainty of relief work in a displaced persons camp, making his way from day to day at Andrew's side. Put that way, it hardly seemed difficult.

Into his mind came something Laurie had once said. _Next time you go away, I'm coming with you_.

"I will," said Ralph. "Of course I will."

**Author's Note:**

> This one took a great deal of research, and I'm sure that I will have got something wrong, whether it's wartime memorial services or the Union Castle line in 1946.
> 
> The original inspiration for the story was this firsthand account of wartime service:  
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/68/a6177468.shtml  
> My imagination was grabbed by the idea of Andrew being able to join the RAMC as a paratrooper, and from there the course was obvious.
> 
> His unit, whose history I have tried to follow:  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/225th_(Parachute)_Field_Ambulance
> 
> Further background information:
> 
> http://www.pegasusarchive.org/varsity/main.htm
> 
> http://www.paradata.org.uk/
> 
> http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009517  
> (and the story would probably be a lot better if I'd managed to listen to all of this oral history!)
> 
> Books that were useful to me included:
> 
> Maureen Waller, _London 1945: Life in the Debris of War_
> 
> Peter Brock, _Against the Draft_ (which includes a chapter on "British Conscientious Objectors as Medical Paratroopers in the Second World War")


End file.
